Essence ofTrading Card Games

By drinking this golden Essence, you will gain the ability to bring card games to life.

• NOTE: The powers of this Essence only work on the cards obtained thanks to the Essence itself.

• All the cards obtained through this Essence share the following properties. The cards are incorporeal and magical, and will never deteriorate. At will, you can summon them, move them around with your mind, and banish them into your personal collection/hammerspace (which has infinite capacity). If you want to, you can make them invisible to everyone except yourself.

• Every card obtained through this Essence has a “price”, depending on its rarity. If a single booster pack is guaranteed to contain X cards of that rarity, the price is 100 points divided by X; if there's only a 1-in-X chance that a booster pack contains a card of that rarity, the price is 100 points multiplied by X. A promotional card is always worth 10.000 points.

• Upon drinking this essence, you will obtain ONE pre-constructed deck of any trading card game that is or was available in your world.

• Once per day, you can obtain one booster pack of any TCG of your choice, present or past. You can choose the specific expansion.

• You have the power to “play” a card and use its abilities, by paying its cost; unless otherwise noted, you must use the resources gathered by other cards. The specific effect of a played card depends on its type: for example, a creature card will summon the creature depicted, an artifact card will summon the item, and a sorcery card will cast itself as a spell. Every card you play will be loyal to you.

• If you want, you can make it so that every damage caused by your cards will be non-lethal. Any person “killed” by one of your cards will instead fall in a coma that will last for several days; you can wake them up earlier than intended, if you want.

• Every time you play a card, you can make minor alterations to it. For example, you can change a creature's color, or lewdify it; but their design will still be similar to the original picture (so no changing the creature's race, for example).

• You have two different states: Free Mode, and Game Mode. Free Mode allows you to play cards directly from your collection, but makes them much weaker and limits the amount of cards that can be “in play” at the same time; while Game Mode makes the cards significantly stronger, but forces you to follow the rules of the game while it's active. You can switch between these states at any time. Switching to one mode will immediately de-summon all the cards that you played in the other mode.

• During Free Mode, you can play any card in your collection at any time: your collection will act as both your deck and your hand. As a general rule, the cheapest non-free monster will posses strength equivalent to one average human.

• To pay the cost of a card in Free Mode, you can either gain resources by using other cards; or you can supply the resource yourself (for example, you if you have your own reserves of magic energy, you can use them to pay the cost of a Magic The Gathering card).

• During Free Mode, a “turn” lasts 5 minutes. However, with training, you can increase this limit indefinitely, or decrease it to six seconds.

• When you play a card in Free Mode, you can choose to “put it in the discard pile”. Doing so will transform it in a ghost version of itself. This still counts towards the limit of cards that you can play in Free Mode (see below). Likewise, if the card is destroyed/defeated/spent, you can choose to put it in this ghost state or return it to your collection.

• Free Mode has two limits regarding how many cards you have, Initially, you can only have 7 cards in play at the same time; this includes cards that are “in the discard pile”. Additionally, every card that you summon will temporarily tire you out: summoning 14 cards within an hour will knock you unconscious for several hours. Both of these limits will increase as you grow in strength and experience, allowing you to sustain multiple cards at the same time and to summon more cards before fainting.

• At any time during Free Mode, you can sell any card that you own for 1/10th of its price; the cards that you sell will disappear forever. You can also buy any card by paying its full price. Keep in mind, however, that the points that you gain from selling the cards of a certain TCG can only be spent to buy cards of that same TCG.

• Game Mode forces you to play by following the rules of the game. When you activate Game Mode, you must choose which deck you want to play; the deck must be legal, so you cannot mix-and-match cards from different games. As long as Game Mode is active, you cannot access your collection unless a card allows you to.

• A "turn" in Game Mode lasts a minimum of six seconds, but has no upper limit.

• Cards played during Game Mode are significantly stronger compared to Free Mode. Their level of strength depends on your own level of power and/or experience. At the bare minimum, their level of power in Game Mode is 10x times their power in Free Mode OR is the same as canon, whichever is lower; at the maximum, they will be exactly as powerful as lore and canon says.

• Since Game Mode forces you to follow the game's rules, you can ignore the “you can only have 7 cards in play” and the “playing cards tires you out” limitations of Free Mode. Instead, as you come closer and closer to defeat, you will lose progressively more stamina. For example, if you're playing a Magic The Gathering game, you will become weaker every time you draw or discard a card from your deck (since you lose if you must draw a card from your deck when you have no cards left) or you lose life points (since you lose if your life points drop to 0).

• Initially, losing a game will knock you unconscious for several hours. Over time, as you grow in strength and experience, this drawback will decrease: losing a game will only drain one half of your stamina, then one third, one fourth, etc.

• When you'll become strong enough, you will gain the ability to play multiple games at the same time, using multiple decks – even from different games. Your mind will always allow you to keep track of multiple games at the same time. Keep in mind, however, that if you lose multiple games, the damage that you'll suffer from each loss will be added together. (For example: when you are strong enough to play two decks at the same time, losing one game will sap 50% of your stamina, while losing both games will drain it completely and KO you.)

• If you switch from Game Mode to Free Mode while your opponent is still standing and hasn't surrendered, it will count as a loss.